A group of programmers with an array of laptops and coffee mugs stakes out the largest table in SoHo Cafe. Not that there’s much competition for seats. Except for a woman in jogging gear and the sleepy-eyed baristas taking her order, no one else is at the Carmel coffee joint at 7 a.m.

Zach Popham says he and the other baristas recognize the coders by the drinks they order. Two of them always order the ninja turtle hot chocolate, Popham says. “Some of them get the plain coffee.”

Most of the men know one another through work. One, a freshman at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, is here for his first time. They all are geeking out, of course, but not only about different versions of Java or the frustrations of Github commits. Talk turns to music and the art of code, too.

“I only know this because I went to music school,” one man exclaims loudly during an exchange of music trivia, “not because I’m not a maniac.”

This is the Carmel version of Code and Coffee, a meet-up founded by Jon Fuller, a professional programmer who learned to play piano “before I could really do anything else.” He is one of many programmers who identifies as a musician and who therefore believes a parallel exists between the way musicians and programmers think and create.

“I met Ryan at Code and Coffee. He was a music major,” Fuller says.

Ryan Clarke majored in music theory at the Verity Institute and later taught there. He then discovered that programming allowed him to be creative in what he believed was a more productive way.

New and hopefully good, as well. With software development a key part of everyday life, some programmers are advocating that engineers actively approach their technical work as a craft. They call it “software craftsmanship,” as if their code were an artisan wooden table or a carefully composed concerto.

“For me, this is a social exercise,” Fuller says. “There is something about being proud of the work you produced. It's not about making something. It's about solving the problem.”

In 1990 U.S. software companies employed about 778,000 people, according to a 2014 white paper by the Software & Information Industry Association. By 2014 the number increased to 2.5 million. The number of software developers alone is expected to grow 22 percent by 2022 to 1.24 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Poor work isn’t uncommon.

Corey Haines, a Chicago-based programmer and proponent of software craftsmanship, says everyone has been a victim of bad code: code that has been written so thoughtlessly that it runs slowly, crashes or takes up too much memory. It’s made from a to-do list provided by a client who thinks he or she knows what he or she wants. Good code, on the other hand, is a product of consistent dialogue between the programmer and the client as they discover what product the client actually needs. Good code accepts changes easily.

In 2007 Haines and other proponents of software craftsmanship decided that enough was enough. In the spirit of “the old ways are best,” they encouraged other engineers to examine software techniques like “object oriented” and “ functional programming” as they were originally used in the 1970s. They even created a software craftsmanship manifesto.

Sometimes, Haines acknowledges, “Ikea” code is appropriate. Not so other times. “It's very, very important to build something that satisfies a need, to build it well so that it stands the test of time,” he says. “It’s OK to not build crap.”

Haines, like many of the programmers at Code and Coffee, also is an artist. He has been taking guitar and drawing lessons in Chicago, joining the many other developers who have noticed a correlation between musicians and coders. Mastering both skills involves piecing together details while keeping in mind the larger end goal.

Blogger and instructional book author Zed Shaw writes how in music a song can be played on many instruments and sound different but be the same piece while software can look and feel identical but be written in a variety of programming languages. Both crafts are honed only by practice, less so by studying. And both musicians and programmers bounce ideas off one another when working in teams. They riff, if you will, though rather than C chords it’s about C programming language.

“I want to build this app for my watch that counts down the hours in a day, but the problem is, I'm not that good at C,” says Josh Martin, the IUPUI freshman.

“Isn't that just a clock?” someone asks.

Martin clarifies that the app would tell him how many hours are remaining in a day, not necessarily the time. “It’d help with my productivity,” Martin says, “but I’m not good at C when it comes to time.”

“I'm bad at C,” says Code and Coffee lover Joseph Manley, “but can I take a look?”

Email Anne M. Li and ali2@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @annemiaoli.